Discover a collection of original stories by Norman Waterhouse. Each story offers a glimpse into his distinctive style of suspense, mystery, and psychological intrigue.
You noticed her. Followed her around the wards a little, making it seem as though bumping into her was serendipitous and not the highlight of your day. She was petite with a gamine face framed by gold rimmed glasses and a short straight bob. She wore a starched white coat, sporting an armoury of pens in the front pocket and the side pockets bulged by a Filofax on one side and a BNF on the other. A stethoscope looped around her neck, the bell sitting on the faint rise of her breast. There wouldn’t have been more than a year between you but it was light years in status.
She was a houseman, a qualified doctor. North 4A Cardiology. She had patients under her care. She examined, prescribed, got called to emergencies. She got paid. You were a final year surgical student on North 4b, across the corridor from her in cardiac surgery. You were taken with her, thought about her incessantly and tried endlessly to engineer opportunities to be alone with her. When you managed it, your stuttering attempts at conversation dwindled to moonfaced silence. She didn’t feign indifference. She was indifferent. Your cardiology module ended and you shipped out to dermatology on the other side of the city.
But you did see her again.
The bus pulled up, and we struggled with the door handles until the driver walked round and opened them from the outside. We spilled out onto the M4 motorway, the primary artery to West London, into spectral silence.
Thirty yards away, a blue tourist coach faced us, and an upended truck straddled the other carriageway. I had imagined flashing blue lights, lines of ambulances, smoke and engine fires, but it was nothing of the sort. There were no rows of stretchers or casualties with IV lines in their arms and oxygen masks strapped to their faces.
The front of the coach was smashed, and the ground in front of it glittered with glass. I squinted at the other vehicle, a truck with a wooden trailer. The cab lay on its side and the body of the trailer was reduced to matchwood, as though a bomb had gone off in the back. Something else lay in the road, and I knew it was a body.
I’m tired and depressed at the thought of sixty more motorway miles. I also have my lovely twins Daisy and Hector in the back, and I need their patience and their bladders to hold out. At the top of the lane, I turn out onto the A287 which will soon morph into the A3 and the two-lane procession to London. Maybe I pull out a fraction too soon, but the van was way down the bottom of the hill and he could see me with plenty of time. It bothered him, though, and he gives it the full arsenal of horns and lights and jumps on my back wheels. I can see the ‘O’ of his asshole-puckered mouth screaming in my mirror. I stay calm and give him plenty of room to pass, but he screeches out and pulls alongside, with a full performance of finger-pointing, eye-rolling insanity. I feel my pulse jump a couple of notches. He’s big with silvery stubble and red, hammy fists. For a second or two, I think it’s over. He’s past me and he’s vented. We’ll go on our way. Except it isn’t.
He gets past me, swerves in and hits the brakes. I bang down hard on mine. There’s only one lane going up the hill and two coming down, both full, so he has me pinned on the slope. I sit there listening to the tick of my engine cooling. I hear his door slam and he hoves into view. He’s bigger than I thought, and he’s swinging a bat. Instinct takes over. I reverse a few feet, then pull out and overtake him and his van. He takes off my nearside wing mirror with the bat and yells curses as I swerve to avoid the cars coming down the hill. I get back in the lane and put fifty feet between us. Then I stop, push the button for the hazard lights, and check out the mirror. He’s on the way up the hill towards me, the bat slung over his right shoulder.
I activate the boot lid, and with a soft whirr, it lifts towards the night sky. I can’t see his face because of the lights of his van, but I can imagine the sight that now greets him. Daisy and Hector, straining on the leash tying them to the grill that shuts off the boot from the back seats. He’ll see their foam-flecked jowls and snapping jaws and the cords of muscle in their shoulders. I turn and reach behind me.
I release the snap hook and let them go.
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